Writings and rehearsals by

Nathan Schneider

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Usually when I throw out a somewhat crazy idea, it remains just that—a somewhat crazy idea, out there in the ether. But when I proposed in The Guardian recently that maybe Twiter users should buy Twitter rather than letting it get sold to another big company, something else happened. People started organizing. It has become the latest outgrowth of the platform co-op movement that’s the subject of my new book with Trebor Scholz (and 60+ contributors), Ours to Hack and to Own, available for preorder from OR Books.

Want to learn about economic democracy in business school? Good luck. In The Chronicle of Higher Education (available here for a month before getting paywalled), I consider how and why it’s virtually impossible to study this sizeable chunk of the economy in the United States.

The Internet we’ve been waiting for is now available for pre-order—or, at least, a book about it. For the past couple of years, New School professor Trebor Scholz and I have been working the support and build a movement to develop more democratic, fair, and accountable ownership models for the online economy. We organized a conference, traveled the world, and mapped the ecosystem. We also edited a book, with about 60 phenomenal contributors, from Harvard’s Yochai Benkler and Boston College’s Juliet Schor to filmmaker Astra Taylor and Frontline star Douglas Rushkoff. It’s not quite out yet—I’m dealing with the page proofs this week—but it’ll be shipping by next month from OR Books, a publisher that has built a platform-monopoly-busting business model in its own right.

Momentum is building. Just last week, UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn issued a manifesto that explicitly calls for creating platform co-ops. We hope that this book will help show that online democracy is both a live option and a moral necessity.

Cooperative advantages

I’ve been continuing to follow a bunch of different leads along the cutting edge of economic democracy. In The Nation this week, read about Denver’s 800-driver taxi cooperative vying to turn Uber’s disruption into a push for worker ownership. If they keep

Meanwhile, in the September issue of Vice, I return as economics columnist with a report on Enspiral, a remarkable co-working network based in Wellington, New Zealand, which shows how trust can become not only a cooperative advantage, but a competitive one. If you missed it, also, I recently reported for Vice about the latest on ColoradoCare, the controversial ballot proposal poised to bring cooperative, universal medical coverage to all the state’s residents—now, with the help of Bernie Sanders.

Un-branding

You might have noticed that I’m writing from a different email address. Over the past few months I’ve pivoted from a public self-presentation heavily weighed toward modes of transportation: nathanairplane, The Row Boat, etc. As much as I enjoy transportation, I’ve decided to reorient my self-presentation around the name my parents gave me when I was born. So now this is where you can find me and my stuff:

And watch out, because I’m still playing around in various ways, like for instance with a shorter form of the URL; both http://ntnsndr.in and n@ntnsndr.in work right now but we’ll see if it really seems worth keeping. In the meantime, see y’all there!

In this month’s issue of Vice magazine, I take a long look at one answer to that question in Jackson, Mississippi. There, in 2013, voters elected black-nationalist lawyer Chokwe Lumumba as mayor based on promises of direct democracy and cooperative enterprise. Lumumba died unexpectedly less than a year later, but the story of what he tried to carry out in Jackson remains a possible future for Black Lives Matter—especially now that BLM spokesman DeRay Mckesson is running for the mayor’s office in Baltimore.

In addition to the excellent editorial work by the team at Vice, I’m grateful for the photographs by William Widmer, who also took pictures for my Al Jazeera America (RIP) feature on transgender Catholics.

Together with a small, distributed team (join us!), I’m developing The Internet of Ownership, a directory of cooperative online platforms and the ecosystem that supports them. This week, also, Trebor Scholz and I are completing the manuscript for our collaborative book (with around 60 co-authors) on platform cooperativism.

Everyone is talking about Donald Trump. I can’t bring myself to do it. As we choose our apocalypse from among the presidential candidates, I’m starting to think that the best hope this election season may come from state-level initiatives, which in turn could open doors for the rest of the United States. This week, I profile two of the most interesting ones.

Colorado could be on the brink of embracing universal medical coverage. Thanks to an effort in recent months led by a band of doctors and volunteers, a proposal called ColoradoCare is going to be on the ballot, which, if passed, would create a quasi-cooperative healthcare system for everyone in the state. In an article for Vice, I introduce some of the people behind the effort, as well as their delectably Koch-backed detractors.

Meanwhile, a group of Oregonians wants to put a price on carbon and distribute the proceeds to everyone. In YES! Magazine, I interview Camila Thorndike of Oregon Climate, who is leading the effort. As the COP21 talks wind down and Finland considers a basic income policy, the moment seems especially ripe for such adventuresome thinking.

Now, back in Colorado, I’m working with a fearsome team of visionaries and cooperators to strengthen the cooperative ecosystem here. More TK.

#OpenTheseDoors

It’s Advent. As I wrote in my last column for America, the Mother of God is very pregnant right now. It was surprising how many fellow Catholics, who have no trouble contemplating the wounds of Christ-crucified, squirmed at reading about Mary’s stretching skin and discomfort. But whatever. This season is a great time to join the struggle to ensure necessities like paid family leave and access to the means for a safe, minimally invasive birth.

The existence of a pope has never squared well with how we do business in the United States. In The Nation this week, as the United States anticipates and dreads the arrival of Pope Francis, I offer a report on the economics of the so-called radical pope. I draw from my decade-plus experience in the contradictions of papism, plus interviews with leading Catholic economists and economic innovators. The Nation even saw fit to include a list of some of my favorite classics of Catholic economic thought, forthcoming along with the article in the next issue.

For more on Francis, don’t miss my latest column for America magazine on the idea of the commons in the pope’s thought, as well as a controversial blog post about the ecology encyclical and an interview about just how far the Vatican has come on environmental issues.

Higher ground

As much as I still love getting invited to awesome things friends are doing in New York (I do), it turns out that I don’t live there anymore. A few weeks ago my family arrived in Boulder, Colorado, where I am now serving as a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado’s new College of Communication, Media, and Information.

And what’s that book in the way of the mountains? Well, just in time for hauling my books halfway across the country, my dear God in Proof has been released in a lighter, convenient paperback edition—the perfect companion for adventuresome bike rides. Get your copy today!

Debts worth having

We’ve lost our language for talking about debt—for knowing the usurious from the upbuilding, the good from the bad. That’s why you should be sure to pick up Yes! Magazine‘s current “debt issue”, full of stories and wisdom from people like Charles Eisenstein, Laura Gottesdiener, and Raj Patel. I’ve got an essay in there too on the question of what debts are actually worth having. Pick up the issue from newsstands today, and look for my essay online starting September 15.

People’s platforms

You might have noticed that a lot of my articles over the past year have dealt with efforts to build a more democratic Internet. Those efforts are now building toward a first-of-its-kind event at the New School on November 13-14: Platform Cooperativism: The Internet, Ownership Democracy. Featuring co-op developers alongside tech CEOs, venture capitalists alongside domestic workers, my co-organizer Trebor Scholz and I are trying to throw an historic coming-out party for the cooperative Internet. Register now.

To learn more about what we’re up to, see my new manifesto in Pacific Standard‘s “future of work” series, “Owning What We Share.”

Moneyless elf

One last thing I’d like to share with you is a story that appeared recently at Killing the Buddha, an oral history I recorded last year while working on an article for The Nation about a group of hackers modeling their commune in Italy on a medieval monastery. One evening when the others were gone, one of those hackers, elf Pavlik, recited a detailed account of living for the past five years without money or government documents. Read what he told me here.

For about a decade now, I’ve been undertaking a gradual and ever-escalating experiment in using free and open-source software for my everyday needs. It has come to feel like an integral part of my work as a writer and thinker; the computer, after all, is often the chief companion of my day. This has become all the more important as my reporting has focused on resistance to profit-driven economies and domineering ideologies. In the new issue of The New Republic, I write about the pleasures of the community-based technology I use. I mean it as an invitation and a plea—to join the challenging but satisfying task of aligning our digital lives with our analog values, to use technology that depends on how well we build together and learn from each other.

Read the article in The New Republichere. To help spread the word about it, retweet this, share or like this, and upvote this.

Has the Time Come for Universal Basic Income?

Across the political spectrum, the idea of a no-questions-asked payout for everyone is gaining momentum. I’ve written about how Silicon Valley is getting behind the concept as an antidote for what automation is doing to the job market. Libertarians want it as a replacement for means-tested welfare programs, while socialists see it as a step toward abolishing the wage system. It seems like a crazy, impossible idea, but it may not be for long.

On May 26 at Civic Hall in New York City, I’m going to be part of a discussion about the prospects of universal basic income with progressive entrepreneur and activist Peter Barnes. Barnes’ proposal for a “citizen’s dividend” based on carbon emissions is an ingenious way of both mitigating climate change and strengthening the economy. We’ll be joined by scholar and basic-income advocate Michael Lewis, as well as Institute for the Future fellow Natalie Foster. RSVP on Facebook and Eventbrite here.

To learn more about universal basic income, listen to recent podcasts on the subject from my friends at Belabored and Disorderly Conduct.

If you could make a new economy from the ground up, what would it look like?

Enric Duran has tried—twice. In 2008 he became famous after borrowing half a million dollars from Spain’s banks and refusing to give it back. He then masterminded the Catalan Integral Cooperative, a network of independent workers that may just represent the future of work altogether. Now, still in hiding because of his heist, Duran is orchestrating his next utopia, a cryptocurrency-infused global financial system. In this month’s issue of VICE magazine, I go face-to-face with Duran and on a tour of his remarkable undertakings.

What if we owned the Internet? Would we get paid for our likes and comments? What privacy policies would we write for ourselves?

Last month, the Silicon Valley-based network Shareable dispatched me to write a report on the growing movement to experiment with new forms of economic democracy online. The folks at Shareable recognized that, more and more, the so-called “sharing economy” is being recognized as extractive and invasive. In search of alternatives, I looked at cooperatives, networks of freelancers, cryptocurrencies, and more. A popular mantra among sharing-economy boosters has been “sharing is the new owning.” What I found is the opposite: Read my report at Shareable.net.

So old that it looks like new?

I said that this stuff is new, but I was kind of lying. Lately I’ve been trying to keep my eye out for things that are old and new at the same time—or, as Catholic Worker founder Peter Maurin put it, “so old that it looks like new.” That’s why I also wrote about cooperative ownership in my latest column for America magazine, with a focus on the long legacy of Catholic cooperativism, from monastic communities to Mondragon, the largest network of cooperatives in the world.

In the column, I said that this tradition is mostly dormant in the United States and should be awakened—but readers wrote back to tell me that, happily, I was wrong. Though they’re not terribly visible, faith-driven cooperatives are making a comeback. Pope Francis once recalled something he heard his father say about cooperativism: “It goes forward slowly, but it is sure.”

This deeper kind of sharing is present in many traditions—especially those suffering gross injustice. As we wrestle to come to terms with the disparities of economic and police power that plague our communities, now is a good time to be reading Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s recent book, Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. But business will only get us so far; now is also a good time to be in the streets.

Hackers are fascinating—the good ones, the bad ones, the ones in between. From corporate elites like Bill Gates to fugitives like Edward Snowden, we look to hackers to provide for us, to excite us, to liberate us. But why?

This is the question that took hold of me in the midst of my summer’s journey with the Wisdom Hackers—a group of artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and activists exploring elemental questions together. I traveled to Paris, Berlin, southern Italy, to Ecuador, and Silicon Valley, and wound up at a hacker congress in New York. This week, my chapter appears as part of our serial digital book. For just a few bucks, you can read my essay in your browser or in a dedicated app, along with Anna Stothard in defense of hoarding objects, Brett Scott on the creepy ecology of smart cities, Tom Kenning on festival temporality, Lee-Sean Huang on the thinking body, Alnoor Ladha on mystic anarchism, and our instigator Alexa Clay on being the Amish Futurist. And more.

I’ll also be discussing my chapter on Twitter this Thursday morning at 8:30 am EST / 13:30 GMT (the Europeans set the time!). Join us on the hashtag #wisdomhackers.

Other odds and ends

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, I profiled Benjamin Hunnicutt, a historian of struggles for shorter working hours and the dream of leisure. His latest book, Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream, is a must-read (and would make a lovely holiday gift).

My books on God and Occupy are also no less available, either directly from University of California Press (God here, Occupy here) using the special discount code 13M4225, or wherever else books are sold.

Starting this Thursday, October 9, tune your radios and podcast machines to On Being, Krista Tippett’s extraordinary, nationally syndicated public radio show about the meanings of life—I will be the guest.

Krista interviewed me this summer at the Chautauqua Institution about my books, God in Proof and Thank You, Anarchy, as well as my recent reporting on the politics of technology. During our conversation, under the canopy of a Greek-temple-ish structure with more than a thousand listeners, I felt I was in the presence of a mentor and a kindred spirit—someone who shares my love of exalted topics, as well as someone who had taken the time and energy to engage deeply with my work. Choose a way to listen to the show here.

Both books are still available, either directly from University of California Press (God here, Occupy here) using the special discount code 13M4225, or wherever else books are sold.

On to the hacking

Sometimes exalted topics need to get hacked. That’s why I’m taking part in an experiment called Wisdom Hackers, a kind of philosophy incubator. After spending our summers exploring burning questions, this band of artists, explorers, and instigators are sharing the results in a collaborative book, thanks to a new serial-based publishing venture called The Pigeonhole (which my new bride Claire explains here).

My contribution, which formed during a search for new social contracts around the world, ended up becoming a reflection on our culture’s fascination with hacking itself—the allure and the trouble. It will become available on November 10, but in the meantime, subscribe to the bookhere (yes, you can subscribe to books now) and read the work of my fellow hackers.

And more

This fall I’m honored to begin a new column at America magazine, a leading Catholic weekly. Follow my columns and blog posts at my author page.